Archive for the ‘character study’ Category

Getting the hump

A film about two lifelong friends having sex for a porno flick? Hmmm. But don’t rush to judgement – there’s much more here than archetypal crudity.

If the thought of two men having sex appeals to you, fair enough, and there are plenty of other sites to cater for your needs.

However, writer-director Lynn Shelton (My Effortless Brilliance (2008)) has managed to take an American Pie/Road Trip/The 40-Year-Old Virgin concept and delivers, with this character-driven indie flick that in fact offers a great deal more than its marketing might suggest.

Read the rest of this entry »

Digging in the dirt

Tommy Lee Jones would appear to have all the right moves at the moment – his recent performances (In the Valley of Elah (2007), No Country for Old Men (2007) and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)) are absolutely representative of an actor at the peak of his game, a player who’s ageing with grace, dignity and a seemingly unerring instinct for the right script.

Read the rest of this entry »

Darkness visible

Picturenose is happy to repeat the news that the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival (9-21 April) will soon be back in town – to get the ball rolling, PN’s James Drew had the chance to chat recently with British-Spanish genre director Alberto Sciamma.

Read the rest of this entry »

Car trouble

Now, I didn’t rate Eastwood’s last film, Changeling (2008), as highly as the rest of the world seemed to – while obviously very competent, with a good central performance from Angelina Jolie, something didn’t quite ring true. Who knows, perhaps Clint’s still at his very, very best (such as in Unforgiven (1992)), when he’s behind the camera, directing himself?

Read the rest of this entry »

Top dog

Remarkable, isn’t it? I mean, talk about a critical sleeper – Danny Boyle’s genuinely harrowing, touching and life-affirming story about rites of passage, undying love and a 20 million rupee jackpot has scooped Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay at this year’s Oscars – Slumdog Millionaire (based on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup) also won Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay (for Simon Beaufoy) and Best Score (A.R. Rahman) at the Golden Globes on 11 January, as well as Best Film and Best Director at the 2009 BAFTA awards.

Read the rest of this entry »

Punchy

Polish debut director Slawomir Fabicki doesn’t pull punches with his debut feature Z odzysku (Retrieval) (2006), about a young boxer struggling to do the right thing but finding himself being dragged ever deeper into the criminal mire. While the story takes a little time to find its rhythm, once it’s ducking and diving, the result is a solid, adult and engrossing portrayal of the best that a man can do when faced with the worst.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am Jack’s top ten movie

I can’t believe we haven’t covered this one yet. Total Film readers voted it number 4 in the top 100 movies of all time in 2005, and Empire readers voted it a respectable number 10 out of 500 greatest movies of all time in 2008. That’s some mighty kudos for a movie less than 10 years old, voted for by people who actually pay to go and see a movie, not critics. Even the author of the book, Chuck Palahniuk, believes it to be an improvement on his original work.

Read the rest of this entry »

The past is another country…

Felix Van Groeningen (Steve+Sky (2004)) brings a determinedly unsentimental perspective to this tale of friends reunited. Arne Sierens’s screenplay portrays the lives of a disparate group of college friends grown older but not necessarily wiser that are disrupted by the reappearance of one of their number, Zwarte Kelly (Wine Dierickx), who has come back to Belgium ostensibly to see her mum, but who may also have a hidden agenda.

Read the rest of this entry »

Out, proud and fighting

Sean Penn’s at it again – as one of the premier actors of his generation, he has joined forces with American auteur Gus Van Sant in this affecting, impassioned tribute to California’s first openly gay public official, Harvey Bernard Milk (1930–1978).

A force for good and for change who, as is so often the case in the Land of the ‘Free’, had his life cut tragically short by an assassin’s bullet (are you reading this, Mr Obama?), Milk became a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 as a result of his earlier, unsuccessful, but theatrically impassioned election campaigns, and the broader social changes the city was experiencing at the time. Milk had not previously felt the need to be open about his homosexuality or participate in civic matters until he began taking part in the great 1960s counterculture that swept America, aged around 40, which is when we join his story. At that time, homosexuality had yet to be made completely legal in the US, and gays were the frequent victims of social prejudice and hate crime.

Read the rest of this entry »

Saddle up

A chance to enjoy an entertaining (if conventional) Western…

It has a habit of coming back ’atcha, does the Western – while other genres have a tendency to become moribund over time, such as the traditional musical or the traditional vampire flick, the Old West is a tradition that a variety of directors have returned to over recent years, such as with Kevin Costner’s well-received Open Range (2003) and, a decade or so previously, Clint Eastwood’s marvellous fin de siècle opus, Unforgiven (1992).

Read the rest of this entry »